I hate Microsoft

My hard drive has been making weird noises from time to time.

Kachunk Kachunk Kachunk.

I've been concerned that it was on the verge of dying, so I pulled the hard drive out of an older pc that I still had in a closet. It was only 6Gig, but I figured I could load all the pictures and tax info and other important stuff onto the spare, and then if the main drive died, I could always reload everything on a new one.
I figured, while I'm at it, I might as well upgrade the memory. I bought another 512MB stick. I also added an analog-to-digital video converter to convert all the old VHS movies to DVD.

Everything came up ok (or so I thought) so I packed everything back into the cabinet and re-connected all the cabling.

The first problem was that Office XP said it had to be re-activated, because the platform had changed. I re-activated it, but the pc still had a tendancy to suddenly reboot itself.
Grrrrr....
Today, I started out by removing the new hard drive. It still failed.
I removed the new A2D card. It still failed.
I removed the memory stick. It still failed.

My Black Hawk Down game kept locking up and causing a reboot.
Office XP wouldn't even start anymore.

I un-installed the game and Office.
The internet connection failed.

I moved the ethernet card back to the slot it was previously in. That fixed the internet access.

I tried to re-install Office. The pc reboots as soon as the install CD starts.
(Still unresolved. Fuckers!)

Black Hawk Down doesn't allow me to start the game anymore, just to edit the options.

I re-installed the hard drive and the memory and the video card. I think I now have some sort of driver conflict that is independent of the hardware.

Mrs Schwartz can't take anymore yelling and keyboard banging. She has blocked me from further tinkering, for the sake of Thanksgiving peace.

At least I have the internet back up.

UPDATE 8:15 am Friday:
My virus scan is getting hung up on a wave file. Fuck. I may have to just re-install Windows and be done with it. Fuck.

UPDATE 4:33 pm friday:
SUCCESS! It looks like there is something in the A2D card that Windows does not like. I had earlier uninstalled the drivers for it, but apparently that's not enough. I had to actually remove the card. Now everything is back to working, with the new hard drive and the new memory.
Happy Thanksgiving.